Few months in now. The imposter syndrome is still there but it's gotten quieter. It used to be this constant background noise and now it mostly just shows up when I'm in a meeting with people who have PhDs and fifteen years of experience, which is, like, most meetings. But every PR I get approved, every design doc that gets the green light, it fades a little more.
My first big project was modernizing how one of our major ad products handles network requests, migrating from a legacy API to a modern one. That might sound boring but it meant ripping out over 700 lines of gnarly legacy code from a system that handles billions of requests. At one point during the rollout I caught something that would have caused a revenue impact and had to stop it. First time I've ever had to think about "revenue impact" as a consequence of my code. No pressure!
I also built a custom monitoring schema that cut data usage by 95%! I keep having to remind myself that 95% at Google scale means we're saving a LOT of data. Per day. The scale here is something I'm still getting used to.
Living in Somerville has been OK. The Cambridge office is great, the jazz jam is a weekly highlight, and the bike lanes here are honestly better than NYC (blasphemy, I know). But the long distance thing with Holly is hard. I'm driving to Bayside most weekends, she's driving up to Somerville when she can. Four hours each way. We're making it work but I miss being in the same city as her, my family, my friends. Massachusetts was always supposed to be temporary. I just didn't know how temporary yet.
Here's the thing nobody told me about being an engineer at Google: my teaching background is weirdly useful! When I explain stuff in design reviews, I break it down the way I'd explain it to a twelve-year-old. Apparently that's unusual? Multiple people have told me my docs are "actually readable," which I think is a compliment but also kind of a concerning statement about what engineering docs normally look like.
So thanks, I guess, to the hundreds of middle schoolers who trained me to explain things clearly. You didn't know you were preparing me for design reviews at Google, but here we are.